CHAPTER THIRTY

They drew three garages blank, and were late for lunch. Cousin Selina was not at all pleased. She said it didn’t matter in the tone of one who holds fast to politeness in face of overwhelming temptation. She bit her lip and feared the joint would be overdone, and having tasted her portion, sighed and cast her eyes up and then down again. After which she partook of beef and Brussels sprouts with the air of a martyr.

When the tablemaid was in the room Henry and Hilary supplied a little difficult conversation, but as soon as they were alone Mrs. McAlister found a mournful voice.

‘It is a great pity that Marion does not change her name,’ was the text upon which a considerable sermon could be preached. Cousin Selina preached it with vigour. It had always been her opinion that Geoffrey Grey was an unsuitable husband for Marion.

‘Very good-looking young men never make good husbands. My own dear husband – ’ A long excursus on the virtues of the late Professor, who had certainly not been renowned for his beauty. As Hilary put it afterwards – ‘A pet lamb, darling, but exactly like a ginger monkey.’

Leaving the Professor, his widow rehearsed the advice she had given to Marion on more than one occasion – ‘And if she had taken it she would not be in her present painful position. There was a young man whom I would have been very glad to see her married to. But no, she insisted on having her own way. And what is the result – will you have any more beef, Captain Cunningham?… Then perhaps you will kindly ring the bell for Jeannie.’

‘Henry, I shall burst!’ said Hilary when they got away again. ‘What do we do now – Glasgow, or garages? She rests till tea-time.’

‘If it’s Glasgow, we can’t get back to tea.’

‘We could ring up and say we’d got stuck – important business – any old thing.’

‘Or I could go, and you could stay here,’ suggested Henry.

Hilary stamped on the pavement.

‘Look here, my lad, you say that again, and you’ll see what happens! If you think that I’m going to stay here and talk to Cousin Selina while you go off sleuthing by yourself, well, you’ve made a mistake, that’s all!’

‘All right, all right – you needn’t get worked up about it. We’ll go to Glasgow tomorrow. We’d better get on with the garage business this afternoon, though how in the world Miss Silver expects anyone to remember anything about any car in the world after more than a year. It’s a wild-goose chase, but I suppose we’d better get on with it.’

‘We might find a wild goose in a mare’s nest,’ said Hilary.

They found nothing. It was a most cold, discouraging quest. Snow began to fall in the Pentlands, and the streets of Edinburgh ran with a chilly rain. Later there were six hours of Cousin Selina’s conversation before it was decently possible to go to bed.

Next day Glasgow, under one of those dark skies which appear ready to discharge every conceivable type of bad weather – rain, snow, sleet, hail or thunder. It hung low, it bulged, it threatened, but for the moment nothing happened.

From the firm of Johnstone, Johnstone and McCandlish they obtained Frank Everton’s address, and presently found themselves in a poorish quarter, from which they arrived rather suddenly at a very authentic slum.

Henry frowned at the place. It was very much worse than he had expected. There were some ill-looking hooligans about. The tenement houses reared up gaunt and dirty. He looked at the stair up which they would have to go, and took Hilary firmly by the elbow.

‘Look here, you can’t come up. I oughtn’t to have let you come. I’d no idea the fellow was living in a slum.’

‘I’m not going to wait here,’ said Hilary. She felt no enthusiasm for the stair, but even less for this cold slummy street.

‘No, you’ll have to go back.’

‘Back where?’

‘I’ll come with you as far as the corner. There’s quite a decent street beyond. You can just walk up and down there till I come.’

A frightfully dull occupation walking up and down and waiting for someone to come. The street might have been a street in any town. Its flat, ugly houses were as drably dull as they could be. Hilary got tired of walking between them. She thought she would go a little way round the corner to see if Henry was coming. There was no sign of him. The street was much emptier than it had been. She walked a dozen paces, and then a dozen more.

And then she wasn’t sure which of those big crowded tenement houses Henry had gone into. A little thin, strange voice spoke inside her mind. It said, ‘Suppose he doesn’t ever come back.’ And with that a sort of horror came up amongst her thoughts like a fog. She was cold with it, through and through to her very heart. But it was nonsense. What could happen to Henry in that big crowded house? It was swarming with people. It was the safest place in the world. It was full of chattering, scolding women and noisy children. And who would take any notice if anyone shouted or cried out? The horror came again. She stared up at the rows and rows of windows on those great reared-up blocks, and suddenly high up at one of the windows, she saw Mrs. Mercer’s face.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The face stayed there for the time it took to miss a breath and then take two with a gasp between. Then it was gone, moving back from the pane and lost in the room behind.

Hilary went on staring up at the window. It was a fifth-floor window on the left of the common stair. Mrs. Mercer’s face had certainly been there a moment ago. She couldn’t doubt that, because even if she had imagined the face, she couldn’t possibly have imagined its ghastly look of fear. She had never seen such a look on any human face before, and she hoped she would never see it again. At the thought of those desperate, staring eyes, that mouth loose with terror, Hilary knew that she couldn’t wait -she must do something at once. She didn’t even think about Henry. She ran across the street and plunged into the darkness of the stair.

At the second floor she stopped, breathless. You can’t run up five flights of stairs, and there’s no sense in trying to.

Here we go up, up, up.

Here we go down, down, down.

‘No, not down -up. And you’ve got to keep your head, and your breath, or you won’t be any good when you get there.’

All the way up she passed no one except perhaps a dozen children by twos and threes on the landings. They were all very small, because the older ones were at school. They took no notice of Hilary, and she took no notice of them. She reached the fifth floor and knocked on the first door on her left, and it wasn’t until the sound of her knocking came on the air that she began to wonder what she would do if Alfred Mercer answered it. It was a most horrid thought, and what was the good of thinking it – now when it was too late? She could run away… She wasn’t going to run away.

There wasn’t any answer to her knocking. She raised her hand to knock again, but it stayed there, an inch away from the door, without the power to move forward or make any sound. A sort of frozen terror was gaining on her. To break it she made a sudden effort, bringing her hand down upon the door knob. Her hand turned, and the knob with it. The door opened inwards with a click.

Hilary stood on the threshold, and saw a bare passage with three doors opening off it. Funny to say opening when all the doors were shut. It would be the left-hand one behind which Mrs. Mercer had stood and looked out of the window. She closed the outer door and went towards it, and as she did so a cold, cold shiver ran down her spine. The other rooms were behind her now. Suppose Alfred Mercer came out of one of them and caught her by the throat and choked her dead… He wouldn’t. Why should he? One voice said that. And another, ‘He would if he thought you knew too much.’